To the point that one reader made, it is certainly worth asking whether “niche marketing” has perhaps seen its heyday. By simple logic, you can only slice a market pie so thin before you’re down to splitting individual cherries, and it seems to me that the increasing difficulty of identifying viable niches is one of those “early warning signs” that should be heeded.

What you hope, of course, is to find a niche that is underserved, dissatisfied, identifiable, reachable and willing to spend money to scratch their itch. Hopefully, they’re being ignored by the “big players” in that market. Of course, the underlying assumptions are:

1. That YOU can scratch the itch.
2. And…that you can do so at a price point that turns a profit.
3. And…that you can defend your position against the inevitable competitors.

Niche market position is very difficult to defend because most of the vertical market-defensive moves (like segmenting!) are not available to you. It might only take someone with a little more PPC money, some good list connections, and knowledge of some basic Web marketing techniques to knock you off your perch.

…and all of this assumes you have truly identified a niche in the first place, of course.

A better model going forward might be what I call “fusion” marketing. This is a concept taken from genetic engineering (fusion proteins), and a primitive form of fusion can be found on the Web, called a “mashup”. A mashup takes different bits of functionality from multiple sources to create an integrated information product, i.e. a “personalized” home page.

If you take the average Netizen, you could call his desire for local weather to be a “niche demand”, his desire for local news to be another “niche demand”, his desire for RSS feeds about his favorite sport to be another “niche demand”, etc. What a mashup does is NOT to hack up the Netizen even further into smaller and smaller niche demands, but to FUSE a number of his demands into ONE product.

Now, this might look like niche marketing in reverse, or putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, but it’s really much more than that, and it’s worth thinking very deeply about.